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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
From O.J. to Robert Blake to Kobe Bryant to Michael, the modern celebrity show trial makes us voyeurs at a morality play that showcases not guilt vs. innocence but wrong vs. wrong.
Jun 14, 2005 | It's over. Michael steps out into the sun, the doves are released, the already overcrowded Santa Barbara jail won't have to make room for a very special guest.
One more time, a celebrity beats the rap. It should give Martha Stewart something to think about that she's the only megastar who couldn't. And yet, one more time the show ended with the sense that the truth remains somewhere "out there," shadowy and elusive. One more time, it's hard to discern any moral of the story.
The Michael Jackson trial was part of an epic cycle of celebrity trials that started with O.J. Simpson, passing through Kobe Bryant, Robert Blake and Phil Spector (Tyson and the Menendez brothers also bear mention). These trials -- sometimes televised, other times reenacted, always dissected and second-guessed with obsessive attention -- have undoubtedly become a new genre of entertainment. They are American tragedies for our age -- big, crass, bizarre and, most crucially, morally empty.
The crimes or alleged crimes involved are as serious as they could be: murders, rape, pedophilia. The suffering, or alleged suffering, is profound. The scope and impact of the trials -- from the investigations to the legal strategies, the media spin, the social repercussions -- are huge. Yet it's impossible to wrestle from them the moral or even the psychological lessons that classic tragedy provides.
Celebrity trials offer a potent cocktail of fame, sex and violence; they allow us to look behind the veil that usually protects the private lives of stars; they tap in to collective feelings and fantasies about the very nature of celebrity. What they don't do is provide solutions, or even serviceable frameworks, for questions of right and wrong. Ultimately, they are just not about right and wrong. They are about wrong and wrong, and though they are tragedies inasmuch as they deal with terrible deeds and their retribution, they suggest a new definition of tragedy.
In the common use of the word, tragedy can happen when "right" clashes with "wrong" and succumbs to it -- taking the form of sacrifice -- or simply when somebody's "innocence" meets somebody else's guilt -- taking the form of "victimhood."
But classic tragedy is more complex; it has been defined as the deadly clash of "right and right." In "Antigone," the protagonist dies in the name of a simple principle: a sister must give her brother a decent burial. King Creon had forbidden the burial in the interest of the kingdom and must now -- despite himself -- carry out the consequences of his order, which is law, being disobeyed. Fraternal love clashes with the law: Both are right in their own way, but the two rights are irreconcilable. We watch the characters pay the price of their acts, and so fulfill their destiny, in a clean, inexorable, hopeless drama. The truths we learn are certainly bleak and sobering, but they also illuminate the supreme value of courage, coherence, compassion and knowledge itself.
Finally, in a more banal sense, tragedy can happen when random circumstances produce terrible outcomes, as in any "tragic accident."
American tragedy, as embodied in this cycle of celebrity trials, seems to present something different: the clash of two people -- or two "forces" -- who are both in their own way wrong. O.J. and the LAPD. Robert Blake and his wedded grifter. Kobe and his testimony-shifting accuser. Michael Jackson and his alleged victim's mother-pimp. (The exception here is Phil Spector, who allegedly took the life of a waitress-actress whose only mistake was to accept his invitation.)
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